I don't agree that we lose credibility at all. I'm comfortable with SoV and allowing the Lindy effect to do it's thing until the incumbents are out of ammunition. This is a war of attrition, but our advantage is that it's possible to go from collectable to SoV to MoE, but you cannot go backwards once you lose the property or collectible and SoV, which they arguably have.

Monetary transactions cannot compete with spam if they are tolerated and facilitated, for the same reason that proof of work must be arbitrary work without any intrinsic value that competes with the core purpose of securing the network. Spam will always pay more in transaction fees than ordinary transactions, because to the sender it's not spam, it's only spam in the eyes of everyone else, so there must be a zero tolerance policy that all content is spam, only monetary transactions are not spam.

Empty blocks with transactions on L2 is a sign of a healthy network at our current stage of evolution.